Every Short Story – ‘The Star’

Alasdair Gray’s first collection of short stories, , was published in 1983 shortly after the publication of Lanark. Like Lanark, however, it had been many years in the making, with the earliest piece, ‘The Star’, originally published in 1951. A mere three pages long, it first appeared in a magazine for children and concerns a young boy, Cameron, who witnesses a star falling to earth and retrieves it. It not only displays Gray’s tendency to mix realism with fantasy, but creates a rather wonderful metaphor for it when the star is found “in the midden on a decayed cabbage leaf”. Presumably intended for the widest possible audience at a time when Gray was keen to be published, he still cleaves to a Scottish setting through the use of the word ‘midden’ and the brief dialogue (“A’m gawn out”). The ending is equally uncompromising: Cameron, in order to prevent a ferocious teacher (and we’ll meet plenty of them in Scottish literature) from confiscating his star, swallows it:

“Teacher, classroom, world receded like a rocket into a warm, easy blackness behind a trail of glorious stars, and he was one of them.”

A rather terrifying thought for a young child, I would have thought, though one of the more benign transformations we shall find in Gray’s work.